Shimla: The Himachal Pradesh Private Educational Institutions Regulatory Commission has imposed a penalty of Rs 11 lakh on Baddi based IEC University for the violation of admission norms.
As per the information, the university has been found guilty of running as many as 30 external and self-paced learning courses that are not recognised by the distance education mode of the University Grants Commission (UGC) and without the fee approval from the state government.
Commission Chairman, Maj Gen (retd) Atul Kaushik confirmed the development. He said that the private university has not obtained any approval from the commission and enrolled over 3,039 students by taking cover under the letter of conditional approval and collected fees to the tune of Rs 30 lakh.
“The regulatory commission hadn’t sanctioned intake of the seats for the courses,” Maj Gen Kaushik said.
The Education Commission, in its interim order, found it a gross violation of the admission norms and imposed a hefty penalty of Rs 11 lakh on the erring university.
Now with the revelation, future of the over 3,039 students are in limbo. The Commission hasn’t permitted to run these courses in the university. Commission wasn’t in favour of converting distance mode courses into regular courses as such decision would send a wrong signal and encourage malpractices by private educational institutions in future.
Meanwhile, the Commission Chairman has decided to constitute an expert panel to analyse the infrastructure, faculty for conversion of external and self-paced learning courses to regular courses.
